_An Incident of the Occupation of Fall River_
A gunboat was lying at that moment in the mouth of Taunton River, with 4-inch guns covering tall, smoky Fall River. Its officers were watching the signalmen who had been left behind by a detachment of marines that had been sent in to occupy the river streets.
Crouching behind a third-story window of a square, multi-windowed monster of a cotton mill, three men, roughly clad, watched the bluejackets approach. “I tell you,” said one, “it is no use, no use. Have you not read the order? It is that we must not do anything.”
“We have been made citizens,” answered the other, savagely. “And shall we not fight for this country? Go, then, you, if you fear. Peter and I will kill these men. Is it not so, Peter?”
The man addressed nodded, silently. He had a bomb in his hand. The first speaker, shrugging his shoulder, hurried out.
“Now!” said Peter. His comrade raised the window, and Peter’s arm went out swiftly. He tossed the bomb.
It fell in front of the blue-jackets and burst. The detachment reeled. But the smoke had not quite dissipated before the sailors were in order again, running back, dragging their machine-gun and carrying two men, one dead, one wounded.
At the corner they stopped and aimed the gun at the mill. There was a tearing scream, like the sudden yelp of a circular saw when it bites a plank. A stream of steel-jacketed bullets blew against the building. The windows vanished with a clash of splintering glass. Three men, their heads bent low and their arms covering their faces as if to breast a tempest of hail and wind, ran out of the door. They had not gone ten yards when they were jerked, and tossed high, and flung forward, and dropped into a heap that might have been nothing except a huddle of old clothes.
The man at the machine-gun grunted. Squatting comfortably behind his little demon, he turned it on the factory again like a man manipulating a hose. Exactly as if he were sprinkling, he fanned the rows of windows, systematically.
Behind them the gunboat awoke. Its men had learned by signal what had occurred. Their guns opened fire on the street. Four steel projectiles struck the brick buildings, broke through them and tore up floors and walls and girders. As the shells exploded inside, the walls bent outward, seemed to recover, and then suddenly leaned out again and toppled, with smoke and dust mounting into a column on a cyclone of their own making.